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July 23, 2021 New Mexico under assault; voters approve plutonium bomb factory for Los Alamos; update and outreach orientation Thursday July 29, Santa Fe Permalink for this letter (tomorrow). Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Dear friends -- OK, voters didn't approve that. The national security state does not need your vote to turn Greater Santa Fe into a plutonium processing and manufacturing center, the better to supply its global empire with fresh weapons of mass destruction and keep the profits rolling for defense contractors. As revolting as this situation is, it is also a precious opportunity for citizens to roll back the juggernaut of injustice and planetary doom. Why? Because even though we can't vote on it, the national security state does need our permissive silence to proceed. And without a pit factory, it's harder to maintain the fiction that the U.S. runs the world and therefore need not cooperate to solve problems like climate change. Without a pit factory, the U.S. cannot remain "exceptional." Having a working pit factory is all about helping U.S. politicians and generals feel and act "tough." We will not repair injustice at home without relinquishing hegemony abroad. They are two sides of the same coin. The good news is that LANL's pit plans will not proceed in the face of determined opposition. Why? It's not just because those plans run counter to international law and the common conscience of humanity. They also run counter to sound engineering and good management within the nuclear weapons system itself. For the moment, LANL's slowly-expanding pit program enjoys a compliant political environment. Nature and human geography have been less kind. As we recently wrote, that program is already failing for about the fifth time. "How long, oh Lord, how long?" "Not long," said Dr. King. There is some progress in Washington. The notion that LANL could make all the pits is receding; the idea that LANL shouldn't make anypits is gaining ground.
There are additional urgent reasons to meet. New Mexico, as a habitable state in its climate and ecosystems, and as a democratic polity, is now openly in crisis. This is not an entirely new condition, so what is "new" may not be obvious. What is new is the breadth, degree, and publicity of our crises, and the often-strange responses of civil society leaders. This situation presents new challenges, dangers, and possibilities. Item: the obscene, depraved momentary trips to "space" by Branson and Bezos, which get nothing but fan-dom from our news media and politicians. (Caitlin Johnstone's take on Bezos. Bruce Gagnon's.) Item: the public semi-acknowledgement (here and here) of catastrophic, ever-rising temperature increases and water shortages as front-page news. What's missing in official narratives is sufficient realism as to what 3 degrees Celsius would really mean. There is a fantasy that we can "adapt" to such a world, when we know that temperatures like this will trigger amplifying earth-system feedbacks that take us in a deadly direction. And why does our Governor focus on 50 years from now? We know why, and so does she. Item: the enthusiastic political embrace of yet another high-tech war company in Albuquerque ("Blue Halo"), to be built at "Max Q," next door to a 2 million square foot surveillance satellite factory (the Orion Center, more here, part of Theia Group -- check out the promotional video). Item: an utterly mistaken presentation (yesterday) by LANL to our hapless legislature of their plan to guide our energy future. Our Governor is already deeply invested in elements of this fantasy, among others. Needless to say, the state is a big part of the climate problem, not the solution, and our "scientific" national labs are helping maintain convenient fantasies. Add these to pit production, the planet-killing oil and gas industry, our military bases, our nuclear weapons labs and waste sites, and consider the effect all these have on our educational system, legislature, culture, and public morality, and you may conclude that there will be no recovery for this state once we go down this road. That would be correct. We think progressives are fooling themselves about what is possible under political conditions which look remarkably like willful moral depravity. New Mexico is failing, whether we know it or not. For the children, for the animals, for the fragile web of life, we need to talk, and act -- swiftly, nonviolently, and as effectively as we can, working as much on ourselves as also engaged with the nightmarish political and climate situation in which we find ourselves. What we do not need are anesthetized hearts that do nothing. James Hillman: So, the question of evil, like the question of ugliness, refers primarily to the anesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness. The desert of modernity. As Homer taught, we're not going to get past anesthesia on one side and violence on the other without some losses. Better those losses be ours than our children's. "Protest and survive," said E.P. Thompson in his 1980 pamphlet. See you on Thursday, Greg Mello |
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